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So far we’ve protected hundreds of news organizations and human rights websites that have faced attacks aimed at censoring free expression. By protecting these sites, we’ve helped to keep vital information online during elections, major crises and conflicts.
"""
The "major crisis" part of that sentence might be overlooked by some people but it's actually pretty important. It's a well known problem that accidental DDoS happens during crisis situations (if you read a lot of crisis related academic papers you'll see Twitter infrastructure mentioned as very valuable for news updates). The Germanwings crash was a recent example, the official sites were accidentally DDosed and Twitter served as an emergency news propagation platform.
The nasty thing about a crisis is that you usually have your hands full with all sorts of other stuff and keeping up web infrastructure slides down on the todo list and/or it comes unexpected and IT isn't prepared. It's often not part of regular planning (this is changing a bit).
So yeah I hope they open it up for other organizations and "switching it on" will become a reasonably fast process.
The "major crisis" part of that sentence might be overlooked by some people but it's actually pretty important. It's a well known problem that accidental DDoS happens during crisis situations (if you read a lot of crisis related academic papers you'll see Twitter infrastructure mentioned as very valuable for news updates). The Germanwings crash was a recent example, the official sites were accidentally DDosed and Twitter served as an emergency news propagation platform.
The nasty thing about a crisis is that you usually have your hands full with all sorts of other stuff and keeping up web infrastructure slides down on the todo list and/or it comes unexpected and IT isn't prepared. It's often not part of regular planning (this is changing a bit).
So yeah I hope they open it up for other organizations and "switching it on" will become a reasonably fast process.